Van Morrison’s 40th studio album comes packaged in the year’s most unsettling cover: the great man with Archie Andrews – the ventriloquist’s dummy from Educating Archie – sitting on his knee. What can it all mean? Morrison had a 2012 track called Educating Archie that complained about global elites, capitalism and the media, but this is an album of old-fashioned R&B – eight covers and six originals – that don’t appear concerned with the state of the world. Perhaps there’s a clue in the old show, which ran from 1950 to 1960, on the radio – a ventriloquism comedy on the radio! – and Morrison is hinting at the worth of the old as people rush to pursue the novel and the antic. Or, maybe, by combining image and title, Morrison is just mocking any of those who would invest their hopes in any form of figurehead.
The cover, in fact, is more intriguing than the record. There is absolutely nothing wrong with The Prophet Speaks, but Morrison has not made an album destined to be pored over for clues. If he is offering any enlightenment, the message is simply: don’t forget the old masters. That’s signposted by the song selection – numbers by John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, Willie Dixon and more – and by Morrison’s own songs: Ain’t Gonna Moan No More testifies to the power of his blues-singing heroes, with a note that also perhaps explains the disconcertingly friendly Morrison of some recent interviews: “Satchmo chose to play the clown / It didn’t stop him laying it down / He chose to smile instead of frown.” This is the fourth album Morrison has released in 18 months, all laid-back, all centred on standards from the canon of black American music. He’s found something that has fired him up again, and despite the mellowness of the performances from Joey DeFrancesco’s band (this is the R&B Don Draper might hear in a Manhattan bar in Mad Men, not the kind Them played at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast), Morrison sounds fresh. He remarked in one recent interview that he’s trying to return to his beginnings, working quickly without thinking about the demands of the business. His voice, too, sounds fresh – the result of stopping smoking. The result has been a series of albums of simple but real pleasures.
